1921 | Agriculture
Agriculture
Half-hourly radio broadcasts begin March 6 to give quotations from the Chicago Board of Trade, but relatively few people have crystal-sets to hear the prices, which are falling at a rate depressing to farmers. They overproduce on acreage planted during the war, and farm prices in July fall to levels 85 percent below 1919 highs. Cotton is 11¢/lb., down from 42¢; corn 42¢ per bushel, down from $2; wheat $1, down from $3.50. Farmers average only 12.7 bushels of wheat per acre; the soybean crop is little more than 1 million bushels.
The Harding administration tries to relieve the agricultural depression with an emergency tariff act imposing high duties on imports of wheat, corn, meat, sugar, wool, and other farm products. Harding appoints Henry C. Wallace secretary of agriculture (see Wallace's Farmer, 1895); Wallace has made enough money from the family farm journal to acquire five of the best stock and dairy farms in Iowa and adjoining states; he will campaign for farm relief (see Agricultural Credits Act, 1923; Pioneer Hi-Bred, 1926).
U.S. farmers average only 28.4 bushels of corn per acre, but Harvard biologist Edward Murray East, 42, of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, and Princeton botanist George Harrison Shull, now 47, perfect a hybrid corn variety that will yield far more per acre than conventional corn (see 1905; Jones, 1917). Produced by removing the tassels of inbred corn, so that it cannot seed itself, and then pollinated from another inbred parent planted in the same field, it is based chiefly on germ-plasm from Reid's Yellow Dent (see 1893). Hybrid seed permits growing plants of predictable size and quality that can be harvested mechanically, and by next year such seed will be available on a commercial basis to farmers who have never known anything but the flint corn (notably Tropical Flint) which has dominated world markets (see 1930; Pioneer Hi-Bred, 1926).
Boll weevils halve cotton production in Georgia and South Carolina (see 1916; 1924).
Botanist George Washington Carver of the Tuskegee Institute testifies before the House Ways and Means Committee on the value of peanuts, which Georgia and South Carolina farmers are planting in increasingly numbers in place of cotton (see Carver, 1914).
U.S. communist Harold M. Ware, 31, persuades journalist Lincoln Steffens to donate more than $70,000 in lecture fees to buy tractors and other farm equipment for Russia. Elder son of Ella "Mother" Bloor, Ware has made a study of U.S. farming methods in response to last year's request by V. I. Lenin and notes that Russia has fewer than 1,500 tractors, many of them unrepairable wrecks (see 1922).